With Reference To Pp. 3-50 Explain The Term Nutritionism

Reading Assignment 1. Present one idea in the introduction (pp. 1-15) that was surprising or intriguing to you and explain why. (1-2 sentences) * What surprised me in the introduction is that people used to know how to eat well, but nowadays dietary lessons have been confused, complicated, and destroyed by food industry marketers. As a result, we are being advised to consume the fake food which is called “nutrients”.

2. From the section pp. 27-32 explain the term nutritionism and its key feature scientific reductionism. (3-5 sentences, and these concepts will also be covered in lectures.) * The term nutritionism is the main ideology about food. Pollan says, “In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient.” (page 28) * Scientific reductionism is definitely a powerful tool, but it can mislead us too, especially when applied to something as complex as, on the one side, a food, and on the other, a human eater. It encourages us to take a mechanistic view of that transaction: put in this nutrient; get out that physiological result. However people differ in important ways.

3. From the section pp. 40-50 explain what the lipid hypothesis claimed, what
Nutrient content in food has been decreased. According to analysis that was mentioned in the book, “vitamin C declined by 20 percent, riboflavin by 38 percent, iron by 15 percent, and calcium by 16 percent” (page 118). Another fact is that we do not get the same amount of iron from apples today as we did in the 1940s. One apple today is equal to 3 apples of the 1940s based on amount of iron. The important key here is that even though we have a vast quantity of food, we do not get the same quality. In other words the higher the quantity of food, the lower the quality of